The Shit

Before Summerhall was an arts venue, it was part of Edinburgh’s Veterinary College and in the austere white space of its high-ceilinged Demonstration Room students would have sat on the hard benches and made notes as they watched animals being dissected – each incision revealing more bone and muscle. There could be no room more appropriate for a performance of the violent and physical satire The Shit.

Cristian Ceresoli’s The Shit is doubly satiric. On the one level it is a satire about a young woman’s pursuit of fame. On another her body is made to represent Italy’s modern consumerist bunga, bunga society.   

It is not, however, the satire which is memorable – but rather the physical presence of its performer, actress Silvia Gallerano. It is the way she perches naked on a makeshift wooden platform, looking almost diabolical, with a crimson clown mouth and hair wrenched back into two horn-like buns on either side of her head. It is the way she shudders and jerks continuously. It is the way she incants the stream-of-consciousness monologue – the petulant voice rhythmically punctuated by nervous half laughs. And it’s the way that every so often, in the manner of a Victorian medium, she shouts out in a deep rasping voice.

The Shit is one of the more discussed works on the fringe. And yet, the satirical dismemberment is never especially illuminating and there is something terribly old-fashioned, almost troubling, in making the permeable, dehumanised female body a metaphor for the nation-state.